4: SAS drives defrag like any other drive. it is recommended to defrag. the array will be viewed as one logical drive.

5: the sound card is a PCI card and resides in the PCI slot.

6: the S10 planar (motherboard) has integrated audio with 5.1 analog output. it also has S/PDIF (digital) output via an optical TOSLINK socket.

7: yes, it has 92mm front and rear case fans. the S10 has plenty of cooling capacity spread across its four fans. the chassis is designed for 24x7 operation under full load with all PCI slots, hard drives, and optical drives populated. you will not overheat it. the configuration you've mentioned above is very typical (and also quite mild) for an S10.

8: yes, installing aftermarket fans will nullify your warranty. see #7 as to why this is unnecessary.

Re: S10 with SAS/RAID and assorted other questions

hugh - the question above was whether or not factory-configured S10 RAID controllers came installed in the x1 or x16 slots on the S10, hence why i said that currently only video cards use the X16 slots (again, as configured from the factory). an x16 slot by design can use x16, x8, x4, and x1 devices. so, yes, you may install a RAID controller in the x16 slot.

all x16 PCIe slots in the 10- and 20-series thinkstations are 2.0 spec.

Not quite. I don't remember off the top of my head what the specs are for S10/D10, but I know for a fact that not all PCIe slots in 20 series are gen2....the x1 slot on D20 for example is gen1 PCIe. Keep in mind that there are a limited number of lanes to work with in each architecture. For 20 series, there were a total of 40 gen2 lanes available off the IOH. The two x16 lanes eat up the majority of those. Other PCIe slots can vary based on the platform (also note some onboard devices can eat up PCIe lanes as well...making them unavailable to be used in slots).

30 series changes the architecture again with the high performance PCIe lanes (now gen3) running off the CPU(s) instead of the IOH (now PCH).

All that being said, you are correctly stating how PCIe behaves. x16 slots are *not* relegated only to video. ANY PCIe card can run in a x16 slot, even if it's a x8, x4, or x1 card. The ability to downtrain slots to match the card installed is something that's been a part of PCIe spec since day 1.

Re: S10 with SAS/RAID and assorted other questions

gents - so your last replies beg the question: how do i determine on my machine if the PCI and PCIe x4 slots are 1.0 or 2.0? would that be in a detailed schematic i don't see in the maintenance manual, perhaps (which overall is great, btw)?